Using the powers of the debugger to solve the problems of the world - and a bag of chips
by Tess Ferrandez, ASP.NET Escalation Engineer (Microsoft)

Tess Ferrandez

I work as a developer evangelist at Microsoft, and my job is to help
developers make the most of their skills on the MS stack.

In this blog I share tips on anything from debugging and troubleshooting to
development on platforms like Windows, Web, Windows Phone and Kinect. And also some random
tidbits about computing and my life at MS.

By default when you run IIS on a 64-bit machine you will still be running a 32-bit w3wp.exe, so apart from a few differences, like being able to use 4 GB virtual bytes instead of 2 GB virtual bytes the difference in debugging an issue on 32-bit vs. 64-bit is not that big. You will still be debugging with a 32-bit debugger and the memory will be aligned the same as in any 32-bit process on a 32-bit system.
As a matter of fact, something that is very important to point out, is that if you happen...

This is a bit of a continuation of ASP.NET Memory Issue: High memory usage in a 64bit w3wp.exe process so if you haven't checked it out you might want to just glance over it before reading this one to get the context of the problem and some notes on 64 bit debugging.
Before I go into the details I just want to mention that what I will talk about does not only apply to 64 bit debugging even though I am using a 64 bit dump, you can just as easily see the problems I will talk, about and use the same...

A local radio show has started giving out cookie points to their interviewees for personal development, and the other day my coworker decided to give me one for debugging a perf issue in kernel-mode... YAY!!!
Having debugging as a profession, you might have thought that I would have done a lot of kernel debugging, but since I deal mostly with ASP.NET and .NET development most of our issues are in usermode so there is rarely a need to debug the kernel (drivers etc.). In fact, I have only debugged...

Recently we have been getting quite a few similar hangs in ASP.NET. From the first look they really aren't all that similar but when we get down to the nitty-gritty we see that they all hang or rather have a very high latency, in the exact same location.
Problem description:
On startup, the first request for an aspx page, no matter how simple it is, will take around 2 minutes. In fact, all subsequent requests will also take 2 minutes to execute, so the server is essentially out of order.
...

One of the benefits of moving back to Sweden was for sure the 6 weeks of vacation I get every year... yeah you read it right, 6 weeks:) I came back yesterday from taking 4 of those weeks and although I do really love my job it sure is really hard to get into it again...
This season I am going to start off soft with two books that were recommended to me, and since I constantly get emails asking for reading recommendations I thought I'd share...
The first one is " Debugging Microsoft .NET 2.0...

I want to try to keep this blog free of link-listings and just publish my own case studies etc. but when I come across something like these articles by Rahul Soni, I can't help but share them
The infamous debug=true attribute
Post Production Debugging for ASP.NET Applications – Part 1 Enjoy,
Tess

Courtesy of my pals on http://blogs.msdn.com/ntdebugging/ I have added a chance to give post feedback, by adding a survey at the bottom of my case studies. The survey is an anonymous "yes" or "no" click and I'll use it to figure out what type of posts and topics are most useful so if you read a post that resolves a problem for you or helps you in the right direction, please click away:) Thanks, Tess